philosophy, postcolonialism, african-american feminism, and the race for theory

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Notes

notes

1 Simone de Beauvoir states:

Enough ink has been spilt in quarreling over feminism, and for the time being the matter is closed. But still it is talked about, although it seems that the voluminous nonsense uttered during this century has done little to clarify the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? (vii)

The actual contributions and achievements of black women's writing and criticism contradict its invisibility.

2 For Spillers names such as “Peaches,” “Sapphire,” etc. “isolate overdetermined nominative properties,” or a “telegraphic coding,” but are so burdened with “mythical prepossession” that as references they “render an example of signifying property plus” (384). This idea of simultaneous visibility/invisibility, being excess and ground-zero at the same time, is what I term political plus: simultaneously much too political, and hence pre-political (“ground-zero”), yet not really figuring (“invisibility”).

3 Radhakrishnan's “Ethnic Identity and Post-Structuralist Difference” appears in the same issue of Cultural Critique and discusses the larger debate on Derrida and politics.

4 DuCille states: “the privileged white person inherits a wisdom, an agelessness, perhaps even a racelessness that entitles him or her to the raw materials of another's life and culture but, of course, not to the Other's condition” (“Occult” 615).

5 The “ASAP” “anonymous” reviewer states:

I cannot but feel that a conference that would bring together in a few days of papers and discussion specialists on Chicano, Afro-American, Asian-American, Native-American, Afro-Caribbean, African, Indian, Pacific Island, Aborigine, Maori and other ethnic literature would be anything but diffuse. A conference on ONE [sic] of these literatures might be in order; but even with the best of planning, the proposed conference would almost certainly devolve into an academic Tower of Babel. It is not at all clear that a specialist on Native American literature, for example, will have much to say to someone specializing in African literature. It is also unlikely that the broad generalizations Professor Jan Mohammed would have them address would bring them any closer. (Jan Mohammed and Lloyd, “Introduction: Minority Discourse” 6)

6 “Security Council Calls on South Africa to Lift State of Emergency,” UN Chronicle Aug. 1986; Jacques Pauw, In the Heart of the Whore: The Story of Apartheid's Death Squads (Johannesburg: Southern, 1991); John Dugard, Nicholas Haysom and Gilbert Marcus, The Last Years of Apartheid: Civil Liberties in South Africa (New York: Ford Foundation, 1992).

7 “Compensation Case against South African Miners Thrown Out,” Metal Bulletin 30 Nov. 2004, available <www.minesandcommunities.org/Action/press468.htm>. CNN's website ranks Anglo American 196 in the Fortune 500 for 2006.

8 Donwald Pressly, “Mandela's Triumphant Walk,” News24 18 July 2003.

9 Robert Edgar, Sanctioning Apartheid (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1990); Pauline Baker, The United States and South Africa: The Reagan Years (New York: Ford Foundation, 1989); Stephen Ellis and Sechaba Tsepo, Comrades against Apartheid: The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992).

10 Audre Lorde, “Apartheid U.S.A,” Freedom Organizing Series #2 (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color, 1986); George M. Fredrickson, “African Americans and African Africans,” New York Review of Books 26 Sept. 1991.

11 DuCille refers to “the gap between [a] stated wish to avoid appropriating and objectifying the work and images of African American women … and the degree to which [the] text fosters rather than avoids such appropriations” (“Occult” 620).

12 In terms of sati in India, the two choices, forcing of the women or the women choosing to die, cannot constitute the ingredients for producing “a counter sentence” (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 297). In this, the “narrow epistemic violence of imperialism gives us an imperfect allegory of the general violence that is the possibility of an epistemé” (287).

13 See Hull, Scott and Smith.

14 Eugene Jarecki, Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 2005).

15 See Pease.

16 Carby states that in Connecticut “8 out of 10 ‘minority’ students ‘are concentrated in 10 percent of the school districts. By the year 2000, minority enrollments in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven public schools will be approaching 100 percent’” (14). In fact, lack of “nonwhite ladder faculty in universities receives little attention: 3.8 percent are Asian; 4.1 percent are black; 0.4 percent are Native American; and 1.3 percent are Latino” (8).

17 See Kozol.

18 See Spivak, Death of a Discipline.

19 bell hooks, “Dialectically Down with the Critical Program” in Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michelle Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay, 1992).

20 In this parenthetical assertion, I place black women's literature and criticism not as hegemonic US feminism but as exemplary US feminism.

21 See Dirlik.

22 When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law The Immigration and Nationality Act amendments (1965), which prioritized family reunification and undid national-origin quotas in place since 1924 that favored Western European immigration to the USA, India witnessed a massive “brain drain” of its highly educated and technologically trained citizenry. See “Lyndon B. Johnson: Special Message to the Congress on Immigration,” available <http://www.presidency.uscb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26830>.

23 According to Spivak, “metropolitan multiculturalism – the latter phase of dominant postcolonialism – pre-comprehends US manifest destiny as transformed asylum for the rest of the world” (“Foreword” xvi). The “new-immigration-in-capitalism” and “emphasis on assimilation … in the melting pot” pursued “Anglocentrism first, and a graduated Euro-centrism next” (“Teaching for the Times” 5, 10). Due to migrancy as its constitutive condition, the “discourse of post-coloniality … is, in its grounding pre-suppositions, metropolitan. Its language skills are rudimentary, though full of subcultural affect” (Spivak, “New Subaltern” 331).

24 Spivak speaks the “unacknowledged and scandalous secret” of the postcolonial migrant: “hope of justice under capitalism” (“Teaching for the Times” 3):

We have come to avoid wars, to avoid political oppression, to escape from poverty, to find opportunity for ourselves and, more important, for our children … Only to discover that the white supremacist culture wants to claim the entire agency of capitalism – re-coded as the rule within a democratic heritage – only for itself; to find that the only entry is through a forgetfulness or museumization of national-origin in the interest of class-mobility (7)

25 See Puar and Rai.

26 Bahri examines the reduction of postcolonial literature to information-retrieval (11–37).

27 See also Patricia Hill Collins.

28 For Spivak, in decolonized space “the political claims that are most urgent … nationhood, citizenship, democracy, socialism, secularism” are “regulative political concepts the authoritative narrative of whose production was written elsewhere, in the metropolis” (Outside in the Teaching Machine 213). If a “concept-metaphor without an adequate referent is a catachresis,” then “claims for founding catachresis,” (an instance of) naming, “make postcoloniality a deconstructive case” (280). Spivak's translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) binds the postcolonial migrant and deconstruction irrevocably in the US academy. Zillah Eisenstein critiques the presumed Western provenance of these regulative political concepts.

29 Freud describes a game played by “a good little boy” in which he throws a reel attached to a string away from himself while saying something representing “fort” or “gone” (Freud 13–14). He subsequently draws the reel back by its string while announcing “da” or “there” (14). Freud sees this game as the child's compensatory response to his mother's departure, “the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting … by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach” (14). Hegemonic non-recognition of black feminist thought serves as a destabilizing declaration of its being “gone” even as hegemonic thought seems to be repeatedly anticipating and preparing for its arrival “there” – or rather “here.”

30 Spivak states: “Deconstruction considers that the subject always tends towards centering and looks at the mechanism of centering among randomness; it doesn’t say there is something called the decentered subject … To think about the danger of what is useful, is not to think that the dangerous thing doesn’t exist” (Outside in the Teaching Machine 10). Hence, she emphasizes, “a strategic use of essentialism … the usefulness of catachresis” (162). I invert her analysis to emphasize that strategic essentialism qua Europe qua West is deployed in the interest of hegemony.

31 See DuCille's discussion of Jane Gallop's racist sexism towards black literary critic Deborah McDowell (“Occult” 608–12) especially when Gallop makes what Christian terms “high” and “low” the same: French men and black women are “the people [Gallop] feels inadequate in relation to and tries hardest to please” (608). Perhaps this uncanny moment – Gallop's comfort with identifying Derrida's Of Grammatology as Spivak's text – may be the “intentional phallacy” that is the race for theory.

32 If the colonial subject mimics to subvert and become a “menace,” as Bhabha argues, then the colonizing/hegemonic subject mimics the mimic to subvert the subversion.

33 See Abel.

34 When gender is not racialized, an anti-male stance tout contre leads to disavowed race-loyalty.